DALI EXHUMED IN PATERNITY LAWSUIT
FIGUERES, SPAIN» Salvador Dali’s eccentric artistic and personal history has taken yet another bizarre turn with the exhumation of his embalmed remains to find genetic samples that could settle whether one of the founding figures of surrealism fathered a girl decades ago.
Pilar Abel, a 61-year-old tarot card reader, claims her mother had an affair with Dali while working as a domestic helper in the northeastern Spanish town of Figueres, where the artist was born and later returned with his Russian wife Gala.
Catalonia’s High Court said late Thursday that biological samples were found 27 years after Dali’s body was embalmed and interred in a museum dedicated to the painter’s memory also in Figueres. The samples need to travel to a legal medicine lab in Madrid for analysis, which could take weeks.
Abel’s lawyer said a judicial victory would give her a chance to seek one-fourth of Dali’s estate in further lawsuits. |